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Join us at Omega in New & enjoy the Fall Colors too!
Sep 28 – Sep 30 2018 Omega Institute Rhinebeck, NY What’s Next? Reviewing & Revisioning Your Life With Sam Keen and Patricia De Jong
read moreSam Keen, Patricia De Jong & Michael Murphy at Esalen–Not to be Missed!
This is a rare opportunity and we hope you will join us! https://www.esalen.org/person/sam-keen WORKSHOP DETAILS The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. — Winston Churchill Every decade brings new challenges, goals, pleasures, and horizons. Surprisingly, the essence of what we may become, the voice of our future, is already resonating in us. We invite you to explore some novel ways to think about your possible futures, and listen for the echo of promises and potentials still unfulfilled. • Where are you in your journey? • Who goes with you? • What have you accomplished? • What’s old, stale, worn-out, or boring? • What hasn’t happened yet? • What your legacy will be? Experience an in-depth weekend of looking back and forward during this condensed What’s Next? workshop with Sam Keen and Patricia de Jong. This philosophical exploration of the path forward provides tools for looking at our future as a community and as individuals. On Saturday evening, a special feature will be a conversation with Sam Keen and Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy to remember the wisdom, folly, and contribution Esalen has made to expanding the human potential. What we learned…and didn’t. The conversation also celebrates a long friendship and Sam’s 50th year as a treasured Esalen contributor. ADD TO CART DAILY SCHEDULE Fr 8:30 pm – 10:00 pm Sa 9:30 am – 12:45 pm Sa 3:00 pm – 6:15 pm Su 10:00 am – 12:00 pm WORKSHOP LEADERS Sam Keen Sam Keen Sam Keen is a freelance philosopher, teacher and workshop leader. He is the author of numerous books, including Fire in the Belly, Learning to Fly, and Faces of the Enemy. He has taught at Esalen for 50 years. www.samkeen.com Patricia De Jong Patricia De Jong Patricia de Jong, Rev, is an ordained minister and community leader with experience in educational and graduate institutions. She works as a consultant to emerging leaders nationally and coaches in spiritual nurture and transformation. She is deeply involved in justice and peace issues. Michael Murphy Michael Murphy Michael Murphy is cofounder and chairman emeritus of the Board of Esalen Institute. He is the author of four novels including Golf in the Kingdom and The Kingdom of Shivas Irons. His nonfiction works include The Life We Are Given (with George Leonard) and The Future of the Body. During his involvement in the human potential movement, Murphy and his work have been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in magazines and journals...
read moreSacred Journey
This newly published CD Set opens a door to your Quest, your Sacred Journey, which begins the moment you entertain the great question: Where am I going? What is my life about? What do I value? What gives me a sense of purpose? What is sacred, meaningful, of ultimate concern to me? What are my deepest longings? Where am I now on my life journey? Who gave me the map I have followed thus far? Who defined success and happiness for me? Have I forgotten the adventure I once planned, the dreams that guided me? When I get bogged down, nearsighted, lost in the details of making a living, how do I find my way out of the forest? Join Sam Keen on the quest that begins when you open the secret window into your heart. Ask yourself the questions that recover the innocent eye of childhood, which sees wonder and magic in everyday life. This set of 6 CDs includes: Side 1: A Spiritual Yearning Side 2: Preparations for the Journey Side 3: Telling Your Own Story Side 4: Traveling Companions, Guides, Gurus and Fellow Travelers Side 5: Identifying the Sacred Side 6: Recovering Sensuality Side 7: Sex-The Sacred and Profane Side 8: Work, Vocation and Meaning Side 9: The Compassionate Community Side 10: The Practice of Spiritual Ecology Side 11: The Dark Night of the Soul Side 12: Rituals for...
read moreBuild Your Ship of Death: For the Longest Journey Over Endless Seas
I’d like to start off with a reading: “Now it is autumn, and the falling fruit and the long journey toward oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves and exit from themselves. And it is time to go. To bid farewell to one’s own self and find an exit from the fallen self. Have you built your ship of death? Oh, have you? Oh, build your ship of death for you will need it. We are dying! We are dying! So, all we can do is now to be willing to die and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey. A little ship with oars and food and little dishes and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul. Now, launch the small ship. Now, as the body dies and life departs launch out the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage. The ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes upon the flood’s black waves, upon the waters of the end, upon the sea of death where still we sail darkly, where we cannot steer and have no port.” I offer my reflections on death from the point of view of an amateur. There is an enormous difference between dealing with death and grief as an objective occurrence and as the primal, existential fact of my death and my grief. I am dedicated to trying to understand human existence through the mirror of the life of Sam Keen, and I am convinced that I can best understand what’s going on in my culture by reading my own psyche and my own soul. As a philosopher, it is my hope to be a physician of the spirit and the soul. And, that means that I must first be a physician to my own spirit and my own soul. Philosophy is about the healing – or if you want – the salvation of the soul, not particularly or necessarily in a religious sense of the word. It has been said that philosophers are perverts! And it’s true! That was the charge made against Socrates. Everybody in Athens pretty well understood the cultural norms until Socrates came on the scene. Euthyphro, for instance, was on his way to turn his father in for impiety when he met Socrates who started asking him questions. By the end of the dialogue Euthyphro has no idea what piety is. For this disturbing habit of questioning, Socrates was charged with perverting the youth of Athens and given a hemlock milk shake. And that is the job of philosophy, to turn things over, switch appearance and reality. As a philosopher of sorts, I would like to examine the ways we think about death and suggest that maybe we’re dealing with it the wrong way. The structure of my remarks is going to follow a scheme I learned a long time ago from Paul Tillich. Tillich taught us that there were three questions that any religion, philosophy or therapy has to ask and answer. First, “What’s wrong with us? What’s the disease? What’s the pathology?” Second, “What would we look like if we were whole? Healed?” (We don’t even...
read moreSacred and Profane Power
For an analysis of the relationship of sacred to profane power see the full article. Here is a summary:
read moreWhose Carbon Debt?
The world over there is justifiable outrage about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We demonize BP for careless and greedy practices that make a mockery of their claim to be leaders in developing sources of clean energy. But we are unwilling to shoulder our individual responsibility for demanding cheap oil or to take any meaningful steps toward conservation. We demand the right to consume at any cost to the environment. We hate the pushers but love the drug. With a modicum of discipline we could take individual ownership of our escalating carbon debt and eliminate most or all of the need for deep horizon oil. The plan. Require every automobile and light-truck to be fitted with a gauge, such is now standard equipment in the Prius, that measures the MPG for the last tank of gas used. This information would be fed into computer in the gas pump that would determine the appropriate cost of a gallon of gas. A light pickup that gets 15 MPG might pay four dollars for a gallon of gas, a Hummer that get seven miles 7 MPG six dollars per gallon, a Prius or other hybrids that gets 48 MPG two dollars a gallon. Those with hardships, low incomes and high needs might be offered a discount. At first, such a plan would, no doubt, be met with outrage, cries of injustice, and tough talk from the petroleum giants and automobile companies. How dare anyone deprive us of our God-given right to life, liberty and an endless flow cheap gasoline! But once the government offered subsidies for the purchase of fuel efficient cars and trucks the ethos would change. Conserving would become sexy and smart and we might be able look our children in the eye knowing we were making an effort to become responsible environmental citizens. The carbon debt belongs to each one of us. The responsibility and guilt belongs equally to corporations and consumers. In the oil-besmirched face of BP we see the enemy. If we look closely we might also see a reflection of our own petrol-greed. Time to pay our debt. Let’s reward the behaviors we want to encourage and, otherwise, make the punishment fit the...
read moreAbsence of G-D, Q&A
In The Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred Sam Keen. Q and A. Q. You strike out with a two edged sword against both neo-atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, all of whose books have been on the NY Times best seller list in the past months, and the defenders of religious orthodoxy. Why? A. To begin with they are both dogmatic. “True Believers” threaten us with damnation if we don’t believe in their particular brand of “revealed Truth.” The neo-Atheists insist that all forms of monotheism, even the most liberal and progressive, are murderous, intolerant and irrational and they argue that we should all become rational atheists. Admittedly, a great deal of religion is unintelligent at best and violent at worst, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the jewel in the lotus because it floats in polluted water.. Q. You argue that we need to return to the root meaning of religion which involves the experience of elemental emotions. What are these emotions? A. We might begin with the experience of wonder which is the wellspring of both religion and philosophy. D.H. Lawrence got it exactly right—“There is a sixth sense, the religious sense, the sense of wonder.” Why should there be something rather than nothing? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of my life? Q. What are the other elemental emotions? A. To name only a few: gratitude, compassion, joy, humility, reverence, trust and open mindless. Q. These emotions aren’t the ones we usually associate with the average CEO or NFL quarterback. They don’t mix well with a drive for success. A. Exactly, that is why they have been repressed in modern societies and must be recovered. Secular culture teaches us to be self-assertive, hard driving, ambitious, aggressive, prideful and patriotic. Q. Are you saying we must abandon these quintessential American virtues in order to be religious? A. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that there is a radical difference between a secular and a sacred manner of being in the world. In the 21st century we will have to learn to cherish all creatures in the commonwealth of sentient beings if we are going to preserve our fragile environment, Q. Among other things, you propose that we declare a moratorium on all religious word and undertake “a verbal fast.” What is the point of this? A. To transform religion we need to recover its mystical element. Learn to be silent. Refrain from using the tired, old language and explore new metaphors, symbols and poetic ways of expressing what it means to dwell in the presence of the sacred. We need to take religion away from the clergy and the theologian and give it back to the singers and poets. End the pious arrogance of claiming to know the unknowable. Q. Give me an example of some new metaphors. A. Instead of God: The Ground of Being. The G-d Beyond God. (Tillich). The Self Surpassing Surpasser of All (Hartshorne) The Cosmic DNA. The Big Bang and Blossoming. The Particle Rancher and Wave Rider. The Lord of Fractals. The Universal Unknown Subject of our Insatiable Longing. Central Casting. Etc Q. I am not sure I could pray to The Cosmic DNA. A. Maybe not,...
read moreThe Evolution of the D/evil
The Devil’s Notebook. I have been thinking recently about the evolution of evil. How innocently it begins, how invisibly it grows. The D/evil is in the details His first trick is to encourage a sense of entitlement. I deserve it. It is my just due. Add to this a touch of envy. Memetic desire. I want it (and deserve it) because you have it. Why should Bill Gates have so much and I so little.? When my (impossible) expectations are not fulfilled I become resentful, my sympathy turns into antipathy. Resentment morphs into paranoia. I imagine that the other –my neighbor, my mate– is hostile to me, withholding, a cheating, not giving me my just share of cash or care. I give more than I get. Paranoia leads to creating a fortress —the self puts on its character armor, the nation builds its defenses, the quest for revenge emerges as a perverted demand for justice. Defeating, humiliating or killing the enemy sets the world right, balances the scales. Withholding love and punishing the other allows me to get even. You only got what you deserved, what was coming to you. Once established the cycle of resentment and revenge becomes autonomous of its origins, a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which hostile expectation become self-fulfilling prophecies. To escape the grip of the Devil I must practice living with a sense of gratitude for what has been given me. My life is a gift, not an entitlement. You—my mate, my child, my neighbor do not owe me love (although I am entitled to civility and justice)....
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